Death Note starts off as a mystery manga and a clash between two ideals. Yagami Light, our main character, is an intelligent person who finds a Deathnote Book that fell into the human realm from the Shinigami realm. However, instead of putting it to personal use, he decides he wants to change the world where fear imposes order onto the world. He adopts the name Kira and soon various sects around the world begin to worship this young man's ideology. However, to others, his act is mere terrorism. Another intelligent person, L, is given the task to identify Kira. Can Yagami manage to impose his world order and still evade and get rid of L? Deathnote is an intense chessgame where many lives are on the line.
This entire manga is told from the perspective of our cast of characters who live in Japan. We have Japan's police department (of which Yagami is part of to "capture" himself), the FBI and L, Shinigamis, and Yagami as being the different camps. The story is very intricate from the beginning and it takes quite a few reads to totally understand the progression. This manga of cat and mouse is quite intense at times and Yagami often finds himself cornered. It is awesome to read how he manages to escape each situation through his intelligent and thought out plans.
The characters in Deathnote aren't that impressive. This isn't really a manga about character development or growth. Yagami is pretty much devoted to his ideals, he doesn't really care about individual human life. L is also pretty much only interested in capturing Kira, mostly for self-interest rather than some sense of justice. The police department is just a vehicle for Yagami's use, the Shinigamis are also there to add some sort of intricate side the Yagami's plans since for the majority of the manga only Yagami knows of their existence. We also have other useless side characters such as Misa... who makes thing a bit more intricate and harder to solve for L.
Either way, it is exciting to see Yagami and L battle it out. I think that the whole chess game of cat and mouse never loses its intensity from the beginning. Even in the second arc, the capturing game remains intense, although it is more action oriented with more police infiltration and more deaths.
Deathnote does a good job in successfully presenting a good mystery and a good game of dodge and retaliate. I felt that conclusion was quite satisfactory and acceptable for the long battle between L and Yagami. Deathnote includes a whole set of rules of which Yagami has to play with and L has to figure out - even the reader needs to use some brains to figure out what is going on. Definitely recommended, lots of reader involvement.
